Tag Archives: The Darjeeling Limited

One of the Paste Magazine bloggers, Laurie Delk, just published an article with a few drinks inspired in Wes Anderson movies.

From Steve Zissou’s simple Campari on the rocks in The Life Aquatic to the ubiquitous Bloody Mary, enjoyed by both Richie in The Royal Tenenbaums and Natalie Portman’s unnamed character in the short Hotel Chevalier, a character’s choice in drink tells us a little more about who they are, via Mr. Anderson.

With the first movies, we thought he would be like Woody Allen, whose credits always look like the same, but then he changed. First he added an image, then changed the color and then he changed the font! If you ask me, I think he has become more elegant over the years, and you can also see that in the credits.

And by the way, tell me you can see these images and not mentally listen to the songs that play at the end of his movies.

Today The Playlist (via Blu-Ray.com) informs us of three new titles the Criterion Collection will release this fall, one of which is Wes Anderson’s fifth feature film The Darjeeling Limited.

If you’re a reader of the site you know we’ve been campaigning for such a release since it was announced that the film would initially not be Criterion-ized, so as you can imagine we’re thrilled.

Not much information yet, but Criterion has confirmed the title, and will release DVD and Blu-Ray editions sometime before the end of the year. We will of course keep you informed as more information comes in.

That’s where Wes Anderson comes in. The director of “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001), “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” (2004), “The Darjeeling Limited” (2007) and this year’s Roald Dahl adaptation “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is as much a train-set filmmaker as Zemeckis, Jackson and Lucas, and like Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson (“Punch-Drunk Love,” “There Will Be Blood”), Zemeckis and Spielberg, he’s one of the few prominent Hollywood filmmakers working in the ’70s auteur tradition — and doing it with a style so distinct that it can never be stolen, only imitated. He’s notorious for fretting over every aspect of his movies, from the texture of the clothes to the precise geometric motion of each shot and camera movement to the choice of on-screen font (he prefers variations of Futura). Detractors describe his style as fussy, overcomplicated, even airless — and if one prefers a messier, more spontaneous kind of filmmaking, or a more “invisible” style of direction, Anderson is almost certainly the opposite of fun.

I won’t mount a defense of Anderson as an exciting, imaginative and important filmmaker in this article, because I’ve already done it in a series of video essays.I mention him in this piece because of two particular aspects of his art. One is his commitment to analog moviemaking. He shoots on film and prefers to do everything, special effects included, on the set rather than create them after the fact. Even when he employs digital effects or processes, he calls attention to their artificiality; think of the obviously stop-motion sea creatures in “Aquatic” — or, for that matter, the unruly, roiling fur on the creatures in “Fantastic Mr. Fox” — which the director insisted be fabricated with hard-to-manage animal hair rather than more controllable synthetic hair, because he just liked how it looked.

Be sure to read the full piece at Salon, and leave your comments below. It’s a great essay, and well worth the read.